It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on Earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up - that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.
Death is not painful. It is the most beautiful experience you will have.
The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.
The most beautiful people I've known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.
Any natural, normal human being, when faced with any kind of loss, will go from shock all the way through acceptance.
We often assume that if we are good people we will not suffer the ills of the world.
Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.
However healthy you think you are, remember that vegetarians die too.
If people would get in touch with their spirits, they would be able to heal, emotionally and physically.
Death is staring too long into the burning sun and the relief of entering a cool, dark room.
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
Even when you are happy to see your friends again and laugh at their jokes, the relief is mixed with sadness and, maybe, guilt.
We cannot look at the sun all the time, we cannot face death all the time.
The only incontrovertible fact of my work is the importance of life.
I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever. If you live each day of your life right, then you have nothing to fear.
When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.
I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.
We're expected to go back to work immediately, keep moving, to get on with our lives. But it doesn't work that way. We need time to move through the pain of loss. We need to step into it, really to get to know it, in order to learn.
For years, I have been stalked by a bad reputation. Actually, I have been pursued by people who have regarded me as the 'Death and Dying' Lady. They believe that having spent more than three decades in research into death and life after death qualifies me as an expert on the subject. I think they miss the point.
It is very important that you only do what you love to do. You may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live. And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do.
I am an artist because the knot is so powerful I just can not, nor want to be, anything else or do anything else.
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no death the way we understood it. The body dies, but not the soul.
Life feels pointless.
All events are blessings given to us to learn from.
When someone is telling you their story over and over, they are trying to figure something out.
Hospice nurse.
There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.
I think that modern medicine has become like a prophet offering a life free of pain. It is nonsense. The only thing I know that truly heals people is unconditional love.
We think sometimes we're only drawn to the good, but we're actually drawn to the authentic. We like people who are real more than those who hide their true selves under layers of artificial niceties.
The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.
I'm going to dance in all the galaxies.
Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive -- a peculiar form of denial of our mortality?
Birth is not a beginning and death is not an ending. They are merely points on a continuum.
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
When we grow older and begin to realize that our omnipotence is really not so omnipotent, that our strongest wishes are not powerful enough to make the impossible possible, the fear that we have contributed to the death of a loved one diminishes - and with it, the guilt.
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose, there are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Religious patients seemed to differ little from those without a religion.
Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle.
Tony's wife, Carol, would always get mad at.
Are we all destined to die as failures? Just.
This time, I heard a loud voice, literally heralding the reality that my daughter was never coming back. This time the depression had no walls, ceiling, or floor. It felt even more endless than before and, once again, I had to deal with this old familiar guest. I learned the only way around this storm was through it.
Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy.
We're put here on Earth to learn our own lessons. No one can tell you what your lessons are; it is part of your personal journey to discover them. On these journeys we may be given a lot, or just a little bit, of the things we must grapple with, but never more than we can handle.
It is inconceivable for our unconscious to imagine an actual ending of our own life here on Earth, and if this life of ours has to end, the ending is always attributed to a malicious intervention from the outside by someone else.
There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.
According to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far more loving and glorious than our own.
My patients taught me not how to die, but how to live.
The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over' the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.
I say to people who care for people who are dying, if you really love that person and want to help them, be with them when their end comes close. Sit with them - you don't even have to talk. You don't have to do anything but really be there with them.
